19. Juli 2018

Winners of the 2018 Advocate Europe Idea Challenge announced

The seven winners of this year’s Advocate Europe challenge were just announced (see below for a list of all winners). Congratulations, to all the winners! Each winner will receive € 50.000 to realize their idea and mentoring to implement their vision in the most effective way. Also, one winner of the Community Award, which was chosen by the online votes of the Advocate Europe community, receives € 1.000 to support their idea. This year’s topic, Democracy in Europe, is dear to our hearts and we are very excited for these great ideas to become reality.

In the following months, the winners will document their journey on the platform, so you can follow the progress of these iniatives as it happens. However, Advocate Europe is so much more than just the winning ideas, it is an emerging space and a community of ideas and their creators pushing European civil society forward. So this is a Thank You to everyone who participated so far by proposing ideas, commenting on and helping improve other ideas and taking part in the events. Check out the winners and the thousands of other ideas and be inspired: https://advocate-europe.eu/ideas/

Advocate Europe is an idea challenge for European initiatives realized by MitOst and Liquid Democracy, funded by Stiftung Mercator. Since 2014, Advocate Europe has collected more than 1,500 ideas from 42 European countries, connected 49,745 people on its online platform and invested in 25 winning initiatives that pilot new answers for a common European future.

The Winners of Advocate Europe 2018

Collage of winners of Advocate Europe 2018, Design: Michael Meißner

Democracy Fitness

(Denmark)

“Like muscles in general our democratic muscles require training. Democracy Fitness is a simple, active and motivating training concept. Each session takes 30 minutes and focus on one muscle. All sessions are designed after modern learning principles. In the project we want to gather and train fitness trainers and give them the methods and competences to choose muscles, design training and train citizens from their own context.”

Digital Identity, Citizenship & Democracy in Europe

(Germany, Switzerland)

“There is an increasing gap between citizens and governing bodies in the EU. EU citizens must have more direct voice in politics. ICT’s offer ways to make the EU a living democracy. We see Random-Sample Voting (RSV) as a cost-effective tool for polling and voting to foster citizens’ participation. Based upon digital identity (DI) registered at EU level, it promises EU citizens easier expression of their will on many specific questions and a closer relationship with their representatives.”

EscapeFake

(Romania, Austria)

„Populism poisons the minds of youngsters with fear and untruth. Teachers try to cure it by preaching history books to digital natives. We think teens need to experience education as an engaging experience, so together with school kids aged 12-18 we will co-design and develop an interactive augmented reality escape room scenario. The story and riddles, ideated together with the kids, will be placed in a populist dystopian setting.“

Sisters of Europe

(Greece, Germany, France)

„A website displaying potraits of 16 European women of our times -writers, politicians, activists or normal women...- unveiling their personal stories and how they struggled with issues such as equal pay or sexism but also share their vision for Europe.

An exhibition and a serie of "agoras" (public local discussion), to create a network of women, spread new ideas & possible changes.

A final “cahier of solutions” a list of recommendations will be brought to the European Parliament.“

The EU Activist School

(Spain, Estonia)

„The idea is a pan-European and traveling advocacy school empowering citizens to bring systemic change at local and EU level, acting alone or in tandem with civil society organisations. By building on the methodology designed by The Good Lobby, the School offers 2-day workshops aimed at training & connecting the participants with NGOs. The aim is foster new, unconventional forms of collaboration aimed at protecting & fostering the civic space both locally and transnationally.“

Trace Map

(Germany)

„In social media, populist parties have found the perfect platforms for their deliberate use of misinformation to disturb and emotionalize political debates. In this setting, fact-based discussions have become virtually impossible. To tackle this problem, we are developing an open-source web tool that will empower social media users to investigate and discuss online content and to debunk misinformation collectively.“

WeBudget

(Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Spain)

„The aim of the project is to broaden the way citizens can interact with local authorities, thus influencing decision-making. We believe that creative IT solutions can strengthen local participation and democratic processes. Accordingly, we will create budget schools committed to advocate for budget transparency and participatory space in the budgeting process. With the participants we will co-create a tool that could help building trust between governments and citizens around public spending.“